Just me, DavoGrande, 6'4' and 285 pounds of love, compassion, honor, decency and humility (stop laughing!), bound together by a framework of principle, mainly the Commandments... so far the scientist/leftists have failed to convince me that there is no God and that He didn't create me... :-)

Friday, June 20, 2008

Me, I'm suspicious. I have just one question, unanswered by this article--

What is the daily range of temperatures where the lander is?

The so-called ice was only an inch or so beneath the surface dust. If it was ice, then the area must be below 32* F and VERY dry and hot in the daytime, especially if the consensus is the ice vaporized directly instead of going liquid first.

So is this an area that goes from frozen to smoking every day? But if it's smoking hot and dry during the daytime, why is the ice still partially there in the second photo? Ice doesn't vaporize SLOWLY, does it? If the transition is slow, wouldn't there be liquid?

For me, that stuff could have been dust that blew away. Without actual video to show the process and the time involved, it's speculation.

Scientists are determined to find ice on Mars, because they're determined to find LIFE on Mars, past or present.

Life on another planet would go a long way to proving the Darwinian theory that all begins randomly, and would go an equally long way to proving Bible believers are idiots.

Since I expect to hear from their lawyers if I do, I have decided not to do it.

I won't be cutting and pasting anything from this story. The Associated Press has served notice that it will harass bloggers until they stop, citing 'fair use' and pretending the bloggers are somehow stealing their 'product' to make money.

Most bloggers don't make any money, and the ones who do are not the ones who are using AP material. They are writing their own, very well, and that is WHY they are making money.

The AP, though, is desperate to 'protect its content' from the 21st century. So no cut-n-pastes.

I can link to Yahoo News, though, and so here it is. It's a story about Scott McClellan's appearance on Capitol Hill today to hawk his book some more - er, to testify before the house judiciary committee and tell them everything he doesn't actually know about the White House's activities.

His most shocking charge? The White House was 'secretive'.

He's just whining that he didn't get on the A list most of the time.

The AP's contribution to the sleaze, though, is their deliberate misrepresentation of the Libby case. McClellan complains that the White House told him to say to the public that Scooter Libby was not involved in the Plame affair. The story then points out the both Rove and Libby had in fact discussed Plame with reporters.

But we know, and the story even MENTIONS a few lines later, that it was Richard Armitage who 'leaked' the fact that Plame was in the CIA, and those reporters were actually asking Rove and Libby if THEY had heard that she was in the CIA.

They already knew, courtesy of Armitage, who kept this fact to himself for too long but did reveal it to Fitzgerald THREE WEEKS into the two year long investigation.

So Fitzgerald claimed to be asking a question for which he already HAD, and KNEW he had, the answer. But he kept on, spending tax dollars like water, determined to catch out SOMEBODY in the White House.

And eventually, Libby was caught telling two different stories about the same event, unfortunately contradicting some sworn testimony and thus falling afoul of his own oath to tell the truth.

Libby was NOT convicted for leaking Plame's name. Armitage did that. Fitzgerald did not assert that ANYONE from the White House leaked Plame's name.

This story says Plame 'claims' the White House 'quietly' revealed her name in order to get back at her husband for his perfidy. It also says McClellan agrees.

But the fact is that ARMITAGE leaked her name, and after he did it, it was LEAKED. You can't have multiple leaks of the same information in different weeks. In the first case it is a secret, and in the second it's PUBLICLY KNOWN. The reporters were trying to get White House people to say it, but they already KNEW.

This story very carefully and deliberately shades the truth in order to continue the myth that the White House 'got revenge' on the Plame/Wilson dynamic duo. This is simply NOT SO.

The other inconvenient facts are forgotten as well, such as the fact that she had been deskbound in Washington for six years and no longer qualified as a secret agent under the law that forbids mentioning their names. Her 'operative' career was long over, and she was outside the window of protection. Fitzgerald overlooked this, as does AP here.

Bottom line is, McClellan is still trying to sell his book. Nobody who didn't believe this carp before is going to suddenly be convinced by McClellan's whiny grievances. He puts on display the truth, that he didn't know much and wasn't invited to as many meetings as he thinks he should have been.

Not to mention Carole Keeton Strayhorn, the "tough grandma" of Texas politics who failed to unseat Rick Perry as governor and probably begrudged this failure to lack of support from Bush, is the proud mother of little Scottie. Blood is thicker than decency, especially in Washington.

All told, sickening behavior from Scott and invidious twisting of history by AP combine to induce nausea on a number of levels. Ick.

From the Ft. Wayne Gazette comes this story about the various propositions of the two presidential candidates. At the end, it brings up a few things about Barack Hussein Obama. Excerpts in blue, my comments in black--

"Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama said Wednesday he would bring Osama bin Laden to justice in a way that wouldn’t allow the terrorist mastermind to become a martyr, but he may be killed if the U.S. government finds him.

Bring him to justice in a way that doesn't allow him to become a martyr. Capture him alive, in other words. Exactly how he plans to do this he doesn't say, and no intrepid reporters managed to ask. Then he waffles, saying bin Laden might get killed in the process of being taken alive.

...he said the Nuremberg trials for the prosecution of Nazi leaders are an inspiration because the victors acted to advance universal principles and set a tone for the creation of an international order.

Obama still hasn't figured out that the Nuremberg Trials were a MILITARY TRIBUNAL in which the guilty parties had NO habeus corpus rights, just like the battlefield-captured terrorists at Guantanamo (until last week). He has been quoted last week as saying the Supreme Court justices were right to give these terrorists the rights of U.S. citizens on U. S. soil, but praises a proceeding which did no such thing for Nazi prisoners.

Interestingly, he thinks of the Nuremberg Trials as having an entirely new 'tone', but they actually were conducted based on established international law and trial procedures. The only thing 'new' is that they happened, which was a consequence of the ending of that war and the defeat of the Nazis. The path and purpose of the proceedings had been established for some time. The League of Nations and the Geneva Conventions and so forth had been in place for years.

Obama was questioned about bin Laden after he met with a new team of national security advisers.

The old team having met with some public relations difficulties.

The meeting came after rival presidential candidate John McCain’s campaign said Obama had a pre-9/11 mind-set for promoting criminal trials for terrorists."

Actually, if he's that much of a fan of the Nuremberg Trials, let's just propose to him that we conduct all our affairs with captured prisoners exactly the same way. Military tribunal, no rights granted the prisoners except the right to speak in their own defense.

Wednesday, June 18, 2008

So far this week, I've heard over a half dozen prominent democrats say this, verbatim. They throw in a couple of figures, also pretty much verbatim from the DNC fax of talking points.

Their figures?

We use 25% of the world's oil production while our national reserves are only 2% of the world's reserves. Ergo, summa, non bona, yada yada.

This is apples to oranges. RESERVES and PRODUCTION are two different things. Provable reserves are VASTLY larger than annual production. 2% of provable reserves is an ENORMOUS amount of oil.

The dems are attempting to hoodwink America into believing that tapping these reserves would have a minimal effect on price, but their numbers are deeply deceitful. And they're swimming against a tide of voter anger, where this week even LIBERALS are polled as supporting new drilling 46% vs. 35% against. The nation overall is more than 60% in favor of new drilling.

I always wondered what the price of change was, and apparently it's $4 a gallon.

Tuesday, June 17, 2008

Looks like Algore hasn't finished all his 'green power' modifications at the palatial Gore mansion in Tennessee... his electric bill is higher than ever.

Al Gore uses more energy in the form of electricity in a month than the average American uses in a year. And that's just at HOME, never mind all the jetsetting around in his Gulfstream private planes and all the fancy hotels at faraway leftist thinktank (drunktank) meetings.

His 'people' claim he's buying electricity from alternative sources like windmills and so forth, so he has a smaller 'footprint' (but still a huge buttprint), but I'd like to see how his house is wired... is it a separate grid that delivers these alternative types of electricity? No, it's just an accounting trick, like when he 'donates' his profits from his movie to 'charity' and it turns out to be an ecological charity owned BY HIM, which pays him a hefty salary.

Friday, June 13, 2008

Some have said that because Obama was a muslim only as a child, well then 'apostate' does not apply, as Islam withholds the penalty of death if the change is made in childhood.

As Melanie points out, Obama was raised and schooled as a Muslim for at least part of his childhood, but did not 'become a Christian' (in quotes because in my view he did not and is not) until he was almost 30.

This means the death penalty for apostasy is very much in play.

Is it going to be the KKKlan? Some redneck? A bitter, Bible-clinging, unemployed, gun-toting Pennsylvanian shooting him at a gas station, as his wife has suggested?

Tuesday, June 10, 2008

But do not believe for a MOMENT that anything is actually different. It's all nomenclature and verbal gymnastics, as when Obama claimed 'he doesn't work for me, I"m not paying him'. That's true, but irrelevant. The point was, and is, Obama's circle is just jam packed with radicals, corrupt machine types and criminals. And James Johnson is as corrupt as they come. His advice will receive as much consideration as Obama had planned to give it, only now it will not be publicly acknowledged.

/end update

********

Still waiting for ANY associates of Barack Obama to be ordinary, normal Americans with no radical, corrupt or criminal history.

Still waiting.

Lately he's chosen Eric Holder, former Justice guy under Clinton, to help him find a veep. Holder steered lawyers the right way a few years back and secured a pardon for billionaire Marc Rich, a tax fugitive living it up in Europe but wanted here in America by the IRS, and certain to go to prison if he came back. Holder has admitted, apparently, that his purpose in doing this was to earn favors with certain people so that he stood a better chance of becoming Attorney General in the future.

Another superb choice of search committee membership is James Johnson, who will become famous for having friends in high places at Countrywide lending company. Countrywide has come under incredible scrutiny during the 'housing crisis' for steering lower class applicants to higher interest rate mortgages, and there is something to those charges. But Johnson accepted a loan from Countrywide for almost a million dollars, at an interest rate lower than 4% when the going rate was 6%.

This is a gift, tens of thousands of dollars of free money in each year of the mortgage. It makes him beholden to Countrywide's executives, and perhaps to the IRS as well. Obama has simultaneously attacked Countrywide for its contribution to the housing 'crisis' and welcomed aboard one of it's multimillionaire 'friends with benefits' to the search committee for veep!

It's so bad, even the WaPo has offered up an article about Obama's insider problem. The article, though, fails to mention that Johnson is a partner of Soros. This could be the single biggest problem Obama has, as many Americans will not forget "Betray Us".

Johnson and Holder join Wright and Rezko and who knows how many, when its all over, with more than questionable backgrounds who are now part of the 'Obama legend'.

Does he have ANY associates and friends who are NOT corrupt, radical or criminal?

this is kind of a sick joke to play on a bunch of 18 year olds, don't you think? They're going out there, young, naive, worried about their own performance, thinking about the future, trying to become adults, and here comes a (presumably) respected member of the media laying this ENORMOUS burden on their shoulders, "you've got to fix this broken country".

He's apologized for it, but given the full text of the speech, I don't buy it. He's all the way there, convinced times are terrible and we've gone down the wrong road, his generation has run the ship aground, this election is a once in a lifetime crossroads, etc.

Lord, please grant me this one prayer before I die, that everyone who really doesn't like this nation will just pack their bags and GET OUT.

Exciting, that is, unless you hate Christians and are actively promoting that JudeoChristian history is mythical.... which makes the location of this discovery and its proponents all the more remarkable.

It's in Jordan. The disciples themselves may well have worshiped here.

Monday, June 9, 2008

Senator Rockefeller released a committee report yesterday and said of it, "In making the case for war, the administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when it was unsubstantiated, contradicted or even nonexistent."

As the linked story shows, there is almost nothing in the actual report that is not 'substantiated by available intelligence', in the report's own words. And the President is, by definition, using intelligence as his basis for making any assertions whatsoever about a situation like this. It is the job of intelligence to inform him so that he may decide. He was not deceptively 'presenting intelligence as fact', only speaking about what he had been informed about, in appropriate terms.

The thing that convinced the entire world that Saddam HAD these weapons was HIS OWN BEHAVIOR, delaying and deceiving and ejecting inspectors, all as if he had something to HIDE.

So Rockefeller's report proves that Rockefeller's comments about his report are a load of manure.

The second reason it's stunning? It appeared in the Washington Post. Online, anyway. Not sure if it's in the actual paper. But the moon isn't blue and hell isn't frozen over (I'd have heard), so I would wager it is not, in fact, in print.

Friday, June 6, 2008

Someone finally asked him about this rumor that Michelle appears in a videotape badmouthing "whitey".

B.O.'s first comments, that rumors get spread much easier on the web these days than before the days of instant worldwide communication but that they should get no more credence than that, was reasonable.

Then someone asked "do you know this rumor is not true?"

He responded, "I've answered this question. Frankly, my hope is people don't play this game."

Then more about how rumors spread and how terrible it is and how we shouldn't do it.

Someone asked him if it's acceptable to ask the question, and he ventured that people should think about it before they ask about rumors.

Fine.

But this is not even CLOSE to a denial. He's insisted on a previous occasion that if anyone has evidence that he or Michelle have ever spoken this way, let's see the evidence.

Less like a denial than a bravado-masked inquiry, don't you think?

Seems to me like he wonders if there is such a tape and hopes there is not. In the meantime he's trying to convince the press and the public that it's somehow unsavory to talk about, or ask him about, such a tape.

Thursday, June 5, 2008

After the Tony Rezko convictions became public news, Barack Obama went back to the same well from which he dipped up the classic "He's not the Reverend Wright I knew" line.

Literally.

"This isn't the Tony Rezko I knew" was his response, as well as a lame suggestion that 'reforms' are needed, as if it was a policy or law problem that cause Rezko's misbehavior.

Rezko is a criminal. Many who play the crooked Chicago politics game are criminals. Barack Obama plays that game very well.

Headline on the Future News Network--

"Senator Barack Obama today confronted reports that he has contradicted himself on many top issues during the campaign by watching the videos of himself and saying, ' that's not the Barack Obama I knew. Reforms need to be undertaken to prevent this from happening again, and I'm the guy to undertake them'."

Wednesday, June 4, 2008

As liberals are wont to do, she flapped her gums about a political issue to make herself seem noble and good. She said the earthquakes in China were 'karmic payback' for the way the government has treated Tibet.

I am quite certain that whatever Karma is, if anything, it does not deliberately kill thousands of innocent schoolchildren 500 miles from the capital in order to teach members of government a lesson about ANYTHING.

One might as well suggest that the deaths in New Orleans were karmic payback for a rotten and corrupt liberal democrat government in New Orleans and in the Louisiana Statehouse for decades. Or that Ted Kennedy's brain tumor is karmic payback for a life of contemptible corruption and evil.

You see what I mean. One can take that karma thing wherever one wishes to go. It's stupid.

We all know hurricanes don't choose where they go. We all know that illness strikes good and bad people alike.

And we all know that the deaths of thousands of schoolchildren can't possibly be payback for anything, since they didn't DO anything.

Here's an AP story about a Massachusetts state senator who is, apparently, and allegedly, a serial groper and misbehaver. Just when he escaped trial for one incident of approaching and touching a woman due to insufficient evidence, he got arrested for doing the same thing again.

I'll just say that his political party affiliation is not mentioned until the very last line in the story.

Monday, June 2, 2008

... that when the United States swears in President Obama, Mahmoud Ahmedine-jihad will suddenly and totally change his mind about us being the Great Satan?

I've always said it isn't about what we do, it's about what we ARE.

Free, liberated, modern, culturally alive.

Irreligious.

Pornographic.

Sex-obsessed.

Drug-users.

If you work your way down the list of the things about America that make Muslims mad, you sort of get mad yourself. :-)

Still, these things are inevitable byproducts of hundreds of millions of people living in freedom and doing what they want. We have laws and rules, but for Ahmadine-Jihad there is only one rule-- Islam or die.

"These are mean, cruel times, exemplified by a 'lock 'em up, take no prisoners' mentality that dominates the Republican-led Congress. Historically, African-Americans have turned inward and towards black nationalism whenever they have a sense, as we do now, that the mainstream has rebuffed us, and that white Americans couldn't care less about the profound problems African-Americans are facing. But cursing out white folks is not going to get the job done. Anti-Semitic and anti-Asian statements are not going to lift us up. We've got some hard nuts-and-bolts organizing and planning to do. We've got communities to build."Barack Hussein Obama, 1995.

Notice he did not say "cursing white folks, or making anti-Semitic remarks, isn't fair or morally right."

Only that it isn't practical, that it won't get the job done.

Sure, you can curse whitey and those damn Jews, just make sure you also do some work.

So when Bob Barr first announced he was running for Prez as a libertarian, he was asked by Sean Hannity how he rationalized the fact that he would take mostly Republican votes and that he was likely to cause McCain to lose and a Marxist wacko named Obama to become President.

Barr's answer was utterly disappointing; he dodged the question by simply saying he was trying to offer Americans who are disenchanted with Washington a different choice and that he believed they would take it.

Barr knows, as does the vast majority of Americans, that he will likely be a Perot, taking votes from McCain and causing Obama to win. In fact, Barr has hired people who worked for Perot fifteen years ago.

He knows.

And this article makes it clear the Libertarian Party, though not enchanted with Barr, lusts to be the 'decider' of this presidential election.

These increased costs, threatening to starve the poor and destroy the incomes of many a lower middle class worker, are already unbearable and already receiving mass protest in many forms.

And this is very early in the game, folks. The UN has not yet inflicted itself on us in any meaningful way, Kyoto has been rejected, and the Democrat congress hasn't managed to get anything past Bush that really matters.

But imagine a strong Democrat congress with Barack Obama as president. Imagine a UN and a euroleftist cabal that have free access to American taxpayer funds and can set policy that President O will rubberstamp.

Imagine a totally plundered American economy, in which 'poor, minorities will be hardest hit', as the newspapers always say. But everyone will be hit.

Until now, I was indifferent to McCain and was planning not to vote. McCain, after all, is not a real conservative and has offered opinions of subjects I care about which leave me no doubt that McCain thinks I'm stupid or evil or both.

However, Susan Sarandon has made the best argument yet for voting for Juan McVain, and I'm almost convinced.

Now if only Sean Penn, Jeanine Garafalo, Al Franken, George Clooney and the rest of the wacko liberal Hollywood crowd would make the same promise, I'd become a McCain campaign volunteer.

Thursday, May 29, 2008

I've been watching an HDTV show about the lowland gorilla in the Congo.

Gripping. Couldn't tear myself away. A British scientist followed a family of gorillas through thick and thin, danger and happiness, birth and death, and her party gained the confidence of the gorillas. They never got close enough to touch, but after years of encounters the silverback finally stopped aggressing and acted nonchalant, accepted the group of humans, and the studying really began.

Fascinating, and enjoyable, at least 'til the very end.

The very last line uttered by the scientist?

"we have so much more to learn about this other kind of humanity."

Um, no. Yes, they hold hands and kiss and embrace and grieve and love and all that. Gorillas are, after all, very highly developed mammals.

But 'other kind of humanity'? Let's see.... do they recognize the rights of others? Do they sacrifice themselves for others?

Some would say yes, but the truth is they only do such things for their own tribe. Strangers are all enemies, as it is in nature. Chimpanzees will casually tear babies limb from limb if the babies are from a different family than their own. It's nature. It's the competitive instinct, my line, my family, my children first.

Humans, of course, recognize other humans as such even when strangers. In Israel, hospitals routinely treat sick and injured Palestinians, without questions, without reservations. Being human is the only qualification for deserving help. Our own soldiers treat the battlefield injuries of the other side.

This is the kind of accommodation that apes will never make. Highly developed they are, but they are NOT the complex and mysterious synthesis of mind, soul, spirit and body. They are not made in His image and likeness, but each according to its kind.

We may never know the full extent of the consciousness of the great apes, what they think, how they feel, what they really are.

But they are not human.

Unless you're a wacky scientist-- courageous and dedicated to be sure, but wacky.

When the liberal radio network called Air America first began, the financing came from all over. People thought it was a great opportunity; imagine, a liberal radio show or shows with the success of Rush Limbaugh, only for OUR side! The nation is DYING to hear this stuff, it's gonna be a HOME RUN!

But of course, financing coming from 'all over' has a down side, and it included the looting of a New York charity of almost a million bucks, and lots of fraud and money laundering and so forth.

It's easy to convince people to make illicit 'loans' when you can make them believe it's short term and will be paid back with big interest. that, I'm sure, was the sell.

If they had consulted Limbaugh listeners, of course, they'd have known better. There is no market for liberal talk radio. People don't want to hear it. If they did, there would be a host of programs on local stations already taking advantage of that audience and those dollars.

.. and the mystery of why Scott McClellan wrote his Bush bashing book is now solved.

It's called George Soros' money.

Scott McClellan has sold his soul for liberal money. His publishing company is owned by a financial group that is part of the Soros companies. There is also an investment fund group that is chock full of rich liberals (including the Clintons) who have benefited from Soros money as well.

Whenever a motive is a mystery, find the money trail and the mystery is solved. McClellan was always a man for sale.

As the son of Carol Keeton Strayhorn, former independent candidate for governor of Texas (who was said to be furious at the lack of support from Bush and the Republican party when she ran against former Bush Lt. Gov. Rick Perry), perhaps McClellan had other motives too.

But none of them were honest, none were upright. His 'outrage' at the evil Bush administration is fabricated, a product created for sale.

McClellan is a phony trying to get rich at other people's expense.

Through all this, nobody has revealed what his signing bonus was for the book, or what his payment terms are, or how much money he is expected to make. Anyone who writes a book liberals disagree with is instantly discredited as out for money, and these details unfailingly hit the press. Their absence is proof of his perfidy.

And once again, the dagger hits. Et tu, Brute. Bush sat with this man and congratulated him on the great job he did, thanked him, spoke of looking back warmly on these days in the future.

And in return, another knife in the back.

With all the responsibility of his post, Bush has suffered much over bad results from his decisions. He lies awake at night over the death of soldiers, and his tears are often public, much to his own dislike. I wonder, though, if the greater price he has paid has been to suffer the betrayals by the people he trusted.

As the only decent man in Washington, such things were always inevitable; they are doubtless no easier to take on that account.

Wednesday, May 28, 2008

Well, the initial Memorial Day fluff has faded, and the 'fallen heroes' in B. Hussein Obama's audience have presumably returned to their coffins.... But there's this one thing--

Obama mentioned his uncle (actually great uncle) was in the army and helped liberate Auschwitz (actually Buchenwald) and save the Jews (he didn't say that, but he clearly is trying to fertilize some affection from that group).

Great story, once you get over the stupid errors. Oh, and he has repeated this Auschwitz story before, so it wasn't an accidental mistake. Lots more Jews died at Auschwitz than Buchenwald, and he might have been playing that angle.

But here's the problem:

In the army, helping liberate Buchenwald, was a C. T. Payne. That's all that is known, and the 'keeper of the 89th Division archives' on his website, a guy named Kitchell, is a flaming leftist moonbat who is unlikely to offer/permit any actual research into this Payne fellow. He has grudgingly come forth with confirmation that Payne served in that capacity, but does not add information, like a serial number or full name. He essentially just repeats what his website already says and adds some ugly anti-Bush raving for guys like Dan Riehl of the Riehl World View blog. Enjoy Kitchell's BDS here.

The FATHER of Charles W. Payne is, confusingly, Charles T. Payne, born in the 19th century and unlikely to be serving in the 89th Division during the end of WWII, as he was in his fifties then.

So the question is, who was the C. T. Payne in Germany at war's end, freeing the guests of Hotel Buchenwald? Was he the guy who had a daughter named Madelyn, the mother of the mother of Barack Hussein Obama? Or was that Charles W. Payne, listed geneologically as born in 1924 (the right age, at least) and listed geneologically as the father of Madelyn, and said to have served in the Navy?

(German prison camps generally were on dry land.)

Ultimately, someone is going to have to go into government military archives and sort this out. No help will be forthcoming from Kitchell.

How long can the American left, home of feminism and gay marriage advocacy and all sorts of radical 'reform' agendas, continue to support by default the Islamic fundamentalist movement?

All over the world, western governments bend over backwards to accomodate Islam while simultaneously trying to drive Christianity from the public square and denouncing Israel as a Nazi-like occupier and war criminal.

But Islam HATES homosexuality. Islam HATES feminism.

Islam hates most of the left's pet projects and people. And I mean hates them enough to kill. Young gay teenagers in Iran dangle dead from nooses on portable cranes in the back of pickup trucks while executioners explain to the crowd how to avoid meeting the same fate. Feminists are called whores and foreign spies, and arrested for recruiting and advocating in the streets.

I shudder to think what will happen to the first Iranian environmentalist who denounces government nuclear 'research' on the grounds that it's bad for the environment.

Well, dear reader, the Islamic movement has gained a historic piece of American ground.

They have actually been granted something like police authority in a Miami neighbourhood, by the local government, on purpose. Serious-looking American men in suits, ties and the ever present sunglasses are going to be 'patrolling' a crime ridden Miami neighbourhood in some nebulous quasi-police role explained here.

Something between policing and community outreach, they say. They can talk to people who don't like talking to police, they say. No radios, they have to call 911 like everyone else, that's what they say. They're not police, they're 'liasons between police and the community'.

You see, they claim that they're interested in moral reform. Minister Rasul Mohammad says "what we need most is moral reform".

Moral reform. Why does some small reckless part of me wonder if there's going to be an increase in Muslim recruiting in this neighbourhood? That's what's happening in prisons. There's a British prison (ironically named "Whitemoor") so 'taken over' by Islam that the guards are afraid to go to work and white men are terrified of being sent there to serve time.

And now American Muslims, NOI types, are planning on expanding this fertile recruiting ground by patrolling neighbourhoods and recruiting the young criminals before they even GO to prison.

Even today Christians are still accused of constantly trying to get people to become Christians. Evangelizing, they call it in the Bible. "Get outta my face", says the American left when Christians evangelize to them. Much ground has been gained by the anti-Christians in terms of laws against prayer in schools, hate crimes (homophobia is said to be a Christian crime) and so forth.

These same people WELCOME Islam, probably because Islam is also extremely anti-Christian and seems like a fellow traveler with leftist tendencies.

And one day this bedfellow of theirs will absolutely swallow them whole.

The anti-religion types will find a much less meek religionist in the Muslim; the Koran tells them to take over the whole world by conversion or by the sword.

As opposed to the Evangelical who will walk away with his shoulders slumped at some point, driven to exhaustion by the frenetic opposition to his 'good news', the Islamic evangelizer will instead refuse to take no for an answer.

And he will lop off the heads of those who try treating him with the casual dismissive contempt aimed at the Christians.

The American version of the European transition to Eurabia has begun. The Nation of Islam is now the police, somewhere in Florida.

Tuesday, May 27, 2008

For Barack Obama to misstate the number of American states is a gaffe. For him to misspeak the name of Sioux Falls or Sioux City or Sunrise or Sunshine is a gaffe. He's tired, campaigning is hard, brains cramp.

I can understand his small casual errata.

But for him to claim that 'fallen heroes' are in his audience for Memorial day simply shows what we already know; he is essentially disinterested in America, does not love it, does not feel patriotism, couldn't care less about national history or proud American traditions.

Every American knows Memorial Day is for dead people. That's what a MEMORIAL IS! You can't pay homage to the memory of someone who ISN'T DEAD!

Obama is a slacker, a postmodern dopesmoker who thinks about his country in casually dismissive terms. "Racist, greedy capitalist, environmentally polluting America." No sense wasting an ounce of brain power learning about THOSE traditions; we're here to CHANGE this country, not to celebrate her!

If he showed up at a funeral and lamented the passing of great people, many of whom are here today in this audience, what do you think people would do? Gasp in shock, of course. Rebuke him for being so contemptuously careless about these somber and important proceedings.

He would never make such a mistake, of course. HE KNOWS BETTER.

But he did NOT know better on Memorial Day. Such is his true color about his country. No red, white and blue, just beige. No passion, no commitment, no dedication, no love and no respect.

Next thing you know, he'll be singing the wrong words to the national anthem at a ball game.

Friday, May 23, 2008

Well, looks like those evil rich Jupitericans driving their SUVs and running their air conditioners and leaving their cell phone chargers plugged in all the time are destroying the environment of the beloved planet.

That's what causes planetary warming, right? Rich people? Rich people who use too much energy and don't even ask permission from any other countries?

What's that? There are no SUVs on Jupiter? No evil rich people at all, no people of any kind?

I saw and heard more than a dozen stories about the celebrated Obama rally in Oregon-- stories in which breathless infobabes repeated in shocked tones, "over 70 THOUSAND people!"

Obama, the messiah.

Now I find out it was a daylong party, featuring a FREE concert in the park by a popular band.

That explains about 50,000 of the 70,000. "The Decemberists" are the band, wildly popular in Oregon, and they begin their shows with THE SOVIET UNION NATIONAL ANTHEM.

Booming voices of a male choir celebrating Lenin's great deeds and the glorious future of the workers' motherland. You have to hear it to get the full impact, and you can at LGF. CJ has also provided the words, in English, if you feel like singing along.

Now, if you were the Obama-loving mainstream media, would you mention in a story that a band which plays the Soviet National Anthem opened for Barack Hussein Obama, who is currently reading "The Post-American World" by Fareed Zakaria?

This is an amazing meeting of the vibes here. Could things be any more clear about him?

I have finally found a scientist willing to confront the fact that over historical time, the CO2 increase in the atmosphere is 800 years BEHIND the temperature increase. That is, everytime a warming cycle begins, CO2 does not increase before that, or even simultaneously, but so much later that the Roman Empire could have risen and fallen in the interim.

His argument is, basically, that CO2 does increase global temps, and adds to the strength and length of a heating cycle in a sort of feedback loop. He points out that a heating cycle is about 5000 years, and about 4200 years of a typical cycle could be attributed to CO2 increase, at least in part.

He says it doesn't CAUSE global warming but it greatly contributes to it.

Two Points--

One, what DOES start it? No attempt to answer. ("some currently unknown process").

Two, if CO2 does NOT cause the warming cycle to begin, is it not also possible that it does not contribute to it (or only minimally)? That is, isn't it possible that the actual cause of the heating cycle is what drives the entire cycle, and that CO2 is simply following along just as it did for the first 800 years? After all, if it was feedback, what process STOPS the feedback? Try the feedback loop in your guitar amp, and if you don't pull the guitar away the amp will melt down. What pulls the guitar away in nature? He doesn't say.

For as long as solar activity has been plotted, admittedly only a few hundred years, the sun has charted contemporaneously with temperatures, not 800 years behind them. When solar activity increases, the globe's temperature does too, and vice versa. It is well known that 'the little ice age' of 1650-1715 featured a very low level of solar activity, almost no sunspots, a "Maunder minimum" named for an astronomer of the 19th century who studied records and discovered this dearth of solar activity during that time period.

This article's assertion (Jeff Severinghouse, 2004) is the exact same speculation that the global warming types offered in the beginning, with the exact same questionable proof and outlandish conclusions. It is simply adapted to confront the CO2 lag issue.

More of the same weak arguments. That's what you get when you ask them real questions.

Yet another very good summary of the actual reality of 2008 and where we stand regarding the Global Warming-- er, um, climate change thing.

I'll buy climate change. It's changing fast. From warm to cold.

REAL fast.

UPDATE-- More on this from Investor's Business Daily, a few months back. I have often cited the assertions of this Russian scientist in that year, saying in the face of almost total opposition that the world would be cooling over the next decades. He took a lot of 'heat' for that, but his predictions are proving out.

Wednesday, May 21, 2008

IT's been said by others, and I"ll echo it-- this story will make the Enron collapse (with its casualties, the workers who lost pensions) look like a Disney movie.

All across America, state and local governments are running pension funds. They are running benefits departments. For hundreds of thousands, in sum probably millions, of workers.

Their funding is done on the basis of actuarial data, the insurance company-style estimate of what will happen in the future based on what has happened. Factors like the average age of death, length of time spent with illness, average age of retirement, average performance of investments, etc., are used to calculate how much the government should put into the fund in year x so that when the retiree draws his pension in year z, there is sufficient money in the account to cover it.

Funds are invested, just as mutual funds and private company pension funds. And those investments haven't gone as well as the actuaries expected. Experts are now looking over these decisions, and more than one actuary has been fired. Actuarial firms are even being sued for state and local pension fund underperformance. This is not a case of being able to 'blame it on the evil Bush stock market'; these people are responsible for deciding how much to invest and for predicting how much that investment will yield. It is their area of expertise, it is what they sell when they sell themselves as consultants. Politicians enjoy nothing more than being told they have 'extra money'. And governments have used these rosy actuarial premises to remove monies from the annual pension fund set-asides and use those funds for other things... as all politicians can be counted on to do (see Social Security funds-- missing in action).

Bottom line? Millions of retirees may not get the retirement the government has promised them. That, or the government is going to have to jack taxes through the roof to cover the shortfalls. Many constitutional challenges await whatever decisions the governments might make, but it is certain that this is a nationwide financial catastrophe that nobody is talking about.

And without an Enron to blame for it, the Dems (who are nominally if not totally in charge of most of the governments with failing pension funds) are going to be swinging in the breeze.

As will the American taxpayer, the mighty beast of burden, the dumb ox who gets his cart loaded with more and more people every year, pulling harder and harder, soon to get the whip, and someday to stand still in spite of that whip, no longer willing to move for any reason.

Atlas will shrug, dear reader; it is only a matter of time. Government is not only not PERFECT, it is probably the MOST flawed organization of any kind anywhere in the country. Politicians should not be in charge of money.

Tuesday, May 20, 2008

So good old B. O. believes that we should somehow check with 'other countries' before we decide how much we'll eat, what kind of car we'll drive or where we set our home thermostats.

He thinks it's unfair that we consume 25% of the world's energy when we are only 3% of the populace.

Does this mean that B. O. will be satisfied if we reduce our energy consumption to 3% of the worlds', in order to be fair?

Seems so. And that, of course, means (in the fair world of B. O.) we will use roughly 85% less energy than we do now.

This is the end, my friend. This kind of change means catastrophic collapse of the world's economy, not just ours.

And even if he denies that a 'fair' match between energy consumption and population share is what he had in mind (if not, why bring it up?), we are still faced with a putative leader who wishes to check with France, Russia and Iran every time we order a Big Mac or give the thermostat a nudge on a hot day or buy a used car.

Rules, restrictions, chains, prisons, slavery. Call it what you will, it's the end of American national sovereignty and personal freedom.

"but Dave, we should conserve and use wisely and be good stewards!" Agreed. We should volunteer to make changes in our own lives that suit the times. It's only right.

But when it's mandatory, and when it's at the demand of OTHER COUNTRIES, it's no longer liberty, no longer America.

Imagine the HOUSING CRISIS that would erupt if the European Union was allowed to legislate how big the typical American house should be! Half the houses in the nation would plummet to ZERO value! Banks would collapse, business would close by the thousands, jobs lost by the millions, unemployment and welfare benefits rocketing far beyond the taxpayers' ability to fund them!

"But monsieur, it is simply unfair zat you should have such a big house and such high energy consumption when zere are starving people in Ethiopia!"

You are free, sir, to have that opinion. I am free to dispute it, as I can't imagine what my living in a smaller house would do for an Ethiopian. But once you enslave me with legislation that removes my right to make such decisions for myself, the value of the house I presently own will drop to zero. Forbidden. Too big. Against ze international law.

Unwilling to make payments for a worthless property, I will then default on my mortgage, along with the millions of people whose houses are bigger than mine, and banks will fail, Home Depot and lighting stores and flooring firms and Sherwin Williams and innumerable other companies will close their stores nationwide, and every lawn mowing illegal in Texas will have to go home to Mexico to find a job.

Of course, rather than make a larger home illegal, they could just impose punitive Euro-style taxes on them. This wouldn't necessarily drop their value to zero, but it would darn sure depress it big time. Nobody wants to buy an obligation to pay stupidly higher taxes. We've already seen depressed areas all over America caused solely by rapid and large increases in property tax.

And as the value drops, more defaults, more credit crises, more lost Home Depot jobs, more Mexicans going south to cut their OWN lawns.

Every small and medium business in the neighbourhoods of larger homes will eventually be hit as values plummet and people move out; jobs lost there, stores closed, restaurants starved for business. More jobs lost means more benefits claimed, higher taxes needed to pay for them, and with the tax increase even fewer profits for business, even more closed stores, even more lost jobs, and the cycle continues.

Tuesday, May 13, 2008

Yet another proof that the ethanol subsidy on the part of the world's governments is a truly terrible idea--

Not only are forests being razed to grow corn (adding to global warming, anyone? No more CO2 absorption by THOSE trees), and not only has ethanol production contributed to corn shortages and food riots in poor countries, but now there are other food shortage problems cropping up, so to speak.

When this is all done, the ones who suffer most will be, as always, the POOR.

The very people leftists always claim to be speaking for, helping, defending against the depredations of the evil rich, are the ones who suffer most from the consequences of leftist policies.

When the evil rich are taxed and beaten down to lower middle class, they will still be able to eat.

Friday, May 2, 2008

Jose Canseco has decided to walk away from his mansion, owing 2.5 million bucks on it.

He says in this article that it makes no sense, given there's a judgment against the house, for him to continue paying the bank for it, 'since it already belongs to someone else'.

Never mind that he is obligated to pay the bank, since he bought the house with a bank loan and the bank is not affected, or even interested, in any judgments against CANSECO. They made a deal with him and want him to honor it.

But the reporter clearly asked him if he sympathized with people losing their homes because of high interest rates, and he said he did.

What does this story have to do with people losing their homes from inability to pay? Canseco CHOSE to walk away, DEFAULTED on his loan, not because he couldn't afford to pay but because in his selfish and unethical judgment it didn't 'make sense' to keep paying for a house that one of his ex-wives was going to get in a judgment!

Canseco didn't LOSE his home, he WALKED AWAY voluntarily. He was not foreclosed. He simply said 'I will not bother to pay this debt which my signature obliges me to pay'.

This is a warning shot, dear reader. They do NOT intend to be shouted down or otherwise moved from their long term target of a global tax regime that redistributes wealth 'for our own good'.

They will continue to whine and complain that global warming is going to kill us all, even as the globe significantly cools. And any warming that comes after the next decade will be PROOF POSITIVE that they were right all along.

You only THOUGHT you could dismiss them when the globe cooled.

But it was never going to be that easy.

But if sunspots don't come back, maybe that 'decade' will turn into a generation or more, like it did a couple of times in the past 500 years. If it does, we'll have way more global problems than the attempt to put us all under the yoke of de facto communism.

We're going to have trouble finding something to EAT. Cooler temps worldwide will significantly impact crop growth to the negative.

A warmer planet means more areas can be used for agriculture. A cooling planet, not so much.

Where are the Bush mass graves? Where are the 'showers'? Where are the lists of the desaparados? Where are the Killing Fields? Where are the Bush gulags full of brave honorable journalists eating gruel and whispering to each other about First Amendment rights?

Anyone who lived in the 20th century is familiar with names like Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot. People who literally ordered the deaths of millions of their own citizens, to eliminate political opposition, to reduce the number of hungry mouths the state must feed, or simply because the millions are of the wrong racial background. Pol Pot in particular included Cambodians with eyeglasses on his to-be-slain list, on the grounds that they were intellectuals and could make a more effective political opposition.

Casual stupidity such as this is often the mark of the true dictatorship.

Real totalitarianism, real silencing of dissent, is easy to spot. It leaves a long bloody trail of corpses, empty homes, shattered families. The mark of a well-silenced dissent is that you NEVER HEAR IT.

Even if Bush was not a good, kind, loving and decent man, humbled by his knowledge of God and determined to do the right thing even when it is the hardest thing, I would never believe he was a totalitarian dissent-silencer without at least a couple of pits full of dead journalists or Democrats.

I disagree with Dubya on a number of important issues. I do not expect to end up in a pit.

The proof that the lefties are wrong about Bush being an evil silencer of dissent can be found in the sheer constant grating LOUDNESS of the complaints themselves. Reminds me of the Monty Python sketch in which the peasants bring a woman to the wise man of the village shouting 'a witch! A witch!' When the man asks how they know, one peasant shouts "She turned me into a newt!"

Long pause during which all realize he is in fact a human being.

Flustered, he claims "I got better."

Journalists claim to be silenced, Democrats claim to be repressed and smothered by the evil Bush machine, and yet, somehow, through all the repression and silencing by the evil Bush, we can still hear them loud and clear on every cable channel all day all night. They were silenced, but they got better.

Second thought was the right one. "Narrowly" would have worked, or "barely". But "nearly" made the sentence say the opposite of what it was intended to say.

The one thing that actually works in the favor of the dinosaur journalists' argument for expertise and training and experience is that they actually do go to college and specifically learn the use of the language for their trade. When just anyone can start writing without that preparation, the weakness of the normative American education is put in the spotlight.

Tuesday, April 22, 2008

I've been challenged on several occasions to produce this list, so I figure now's as good a time as any.

In no particular order:Herman Cain. A non-privileged childhood, but with good parents who taught him the value of work and set good examples. Herman Cain was the executive who 'turned around' Godfather's Pizza and earned national acclaim and awards for inspired leadership and good business management, and is now a motivational speaker and author, and fills in on conservative and libertarian talk radio from time to time.Walter Williams. Professor of Economics at George Mason University, a free markets guy with an incredible understanding of human nature and transactional ethics. This guy would make FOOLS of the 'world leaders' who hold America in such sniffing intellectual disdain.

Michael Steele. Almost won the contested Senate seat in Maryland in 2006, normally the bluest of blue states. Former Maryland Lt. Governor, Republican spokesman and now chairman of GOPAC.

Thomas Sowell. Academic and author with a circumspect view of people, life, politics and race, immensely wise and personally humble and understated. Sometimes the best of leaders begin with these traits.

Allen West. While on duty in Iraq, Lt. Colonel West needed to know some critical information which a detainee in his control knew but was not telling. It was about an ambush point, and West was trying to keep his men alive. During the questioning, West held a pistol close to the head of the terrorist and fired it. The tactic worked, and the man told what he knew. West subsequently got in a lot of trouble with the Army over this, but eventually was allowed to retire cleanly. He is now running for Congress in Florida, a black conservative military veteran with an unambiguous love of his country and the achievement-oriented attitude we need in Congress. I would not vote for the brass who wanted to give him grief, but I would most definitely vote for and support Allen West. My kind of guy. He's got a beautiful wife and daughters, and a lot to be proud of and to fight for.

Friday, April 18, 2008

The New York Times reports a drop of over 10% year on year in its primary revenue source, advertising on the web and in its newspaper.

The Times blames two things-- the downturn in the economy and the continuing shift of readers and advertisers to the web.

And of course two things came to my mind as well--

One, don't they have a website? They admitted as much when they included it as part of the ad revenue that's being lost. So they can't really blame the 'shift to the internet'; they ARE the internet. Their problem is that readers are shifting to sites OTHER than the NYT site.

Two, do they have any share of the blame for this shift?

Could it be that their content drives away readers, who then go to the web in search of something they like BETTER?

Sans doute, mon ami. The Times is driving away its audience, and the advertisers know it and are looking for that audience somewhere else.

As we have learned this week after Obama's candid slip in Billionaire's Row, America is not a great fan of the hard left view of the world. Obama revealed his contempt for the common man and for what that man holds dear, and Obama is being held to account for this contempt.

So, over a longer haul, is the New York Times. A long history of undermining the President of the United States in wartime with treasonous acts is not exactly meat and potatoes for the common man.

George Bernard Shaw once opined that the working class does not deserve to live, and that nothing would make him happier than if his generation of working class people died off and were not replaced. He led opinion during the heyday of English leftism, anti-religious intellectualism which spawned the Kim Philbys and Anthony Blunts-- the men who would betray their country, also at war, in acts of treasonous espionage which continued over decades.

One should not doubt that, if not quite to the level of wishing them extinction, nonetheless the left in this country holds the working class American in the same general contempt. They are only good for what they do; they have no inherent dignity or humanity. They're just too stupid and superstitious.

They're for being manipulated to gain their votes, and for taxing. That's all they're good for.

Thursday, April 17, 2008

As Barbara Boxer today embarrasses our nation by altering the language of a Senate resolution to welcome the Pope-- in order to remove any semblance of language that might be interpreted as opposition to abortion-- I'm reminded that I should make this effort now and then. So here goes:

When does a human being become a human being? Forget the ambiguous 'life', I want to know when it's a PERSON.

Because it's illegal to kill a person.

Nobody has ever positively identified the moment, day, week even, when a tissue mass becomes a human being. That 'scientific discovery' has yet to be made. There is much negatively identified, as in "it doesn't even have eyes, how could it be human? It doesn't even have a brain, how could it be a person?"

But no positive ID. No medical statement saying "in the third week of the third month, at midnight on the 78th day, a tissue mass is officially, or medically, or reasonably, a human being."

Yes, it is impossible to know, to agree. We don't even agree on what a human being IS. What is a soul? Does the soul define a human being? Or is humanity only Darwinian randomness, an accidental conglomeration of DNA and goop, something that could just as well have looked like an octopus or an amoeba, breathed helium or CO2?

Is it possible that we are no more than a cosmic accident?

And yet murder is not only against the Commandments ('Thou shalt not kill' in the original language is contextual and means 'don't murder anyone'), it's also against the law.

When the constitutional right to life was established and laws were made against murder, of course, abortion was not even on the horizon of possibility. That particular level of depravity was not among the dreadful things our founding fathers considered when crafting the documents intended to limit government's ability to tyrannize. The "right to life" was not added to the founding documents in order to prevent abortion, but it does argue against that practice if the personhood, the humanity, of the unborn child is agreed.

And of course American law was not the first to proscribe murder; it was generally illegal and almost universally wrong for thousands of years, even among societies which had not the benefit of the Old Testament. For example, in ancient Egypt the Book of the Dead lists the claims to a righteous life that a man might make before the Gods on his judgment day, and one is "I have not slain men."

So forget about the far end of the argument; mankind more or less universally recognizes that we shouldn't just arbitrarily or for personal benefit take the life of another person. And you can't claim an actual human being isn't a human being-- even though some proponents of abortion recognize this particular tension and actually try to go that direction, saying infants shouldn't be declared human until they've lived six months, or nine months, outside the womb. They want to not only have the right to kill the unborn child, but to retain that right for months after the birth. Sickening.

Fortunately that bloodthirsty subset of the far left has yet to gain any real influence, not that they're not trying.

No, the issue is this and only this-- IS AN UNBORN CHILD A HUMAN BEING?

And if not, at what point does the 'tissue mass' assume 'personhood'?

One would think this was dreadfully important, given the emotional commitment to the pro abortion side; how could they even make the case for abortion without first assuring themselves and the nation that in fact they were not advocating the killing of human beings?

Of course they knew this problem well, but were never willing to address it.

This is why the argument was, from the beginning, framed as 'women's rights'. It could never be about the BABY. Because the practice of abortion is indefensible without a national agreement on whether or not an unborn child is a person.

So they made it about 'a woman's right to do as she wants with her own body'. I'm told that when the meetings were held to agree on this deception, some participants actually had a laugh about how easy it would be to fool the public. Call that story apocryphal for now, as I cannot confirm or link it. But I know I have both heard and read this.

Logic demands we reject this 'women's rights' argument on the grounds that it begs the question. The question is 'what is a human being? When does it become human? How do we know?' The 'woman's right to choose' argument is simply a sidestep of the principal objection to the 'choice', that it is possibly the choice to murder someone. If an unborn child is a person, the proper comparison to a pregnant woman is that of a homeowner with a guest, a minor guest whose needs the homeowner is obliged to meet until such time as the guest leaves the house. If you're pregnant and an unborn child is a person, you are not the only one with a claim to rights related to your body. Your 'guest' is subject to the decisions you make about your own health, and you are obliged to meet the guest's basic needs.

And to anyone who makes the claim that an unborn child is not a person, I simply say prove it.

There is no argument presented by the left that conclusively, medically, logically, rationally proves that an unborn child is somehow not yet a human being, especially an argument that shows rationally at what point in the timeline 'humanity' somehow establishes itself within the tissue mass.

If they had such an argument, you can bet it would be universally known and extensively repeated in the media. The fact that even now, more than thirty years after the Supreme Court finding, they still speak of it in terms of 'a woman's right to choose' reveals the dishonesty inherent in the argument of the left.

A woman does not have the right to 'choose' to murder someone, any more than a man has it. If an unborn child is nothing more than a tumor, no rational person would try to prevent her from choosing to have it removed-- but the left does not make any attempt to prove that the tissue mass has no personhood.

They stand on the 'woman's right to choose'.

So rational thought here makes a sensible stand; given mankind is more or less universally opposed to murder and has been from earliest history, if we cannot know, for certain, sufficient to dismiss the question, that an unborn child is not a person, shouldn't we extend the benefit of the doubt to this little would-be person? At least temporarily, until such time as society might agree on what a person is and when it is?

If you were hunting in a field and saw something that might be a deer and might also be a person, would you say "I have the right to hunt!" and pull the trigger?

If you were driving at night and saw a lump ahead in the road, and it might be a trash bag but might also be a person, would you simply hold your course because you have the right to choose what lane you're in?

Society has, regrettably, chosen to blind itself to this, chosen to charge ahead and run over whatever's there, to pull that trigger even though the thing in its sights may be a person.

Because nobody is capable of making a genuine argument that an unborn child is NOT a person.

The Judeo-Christian view is that God, who has always existed and who created all things, also created us. The Bible teaches that God invented each of us first as an idea, a personality, a soul, and then later as a human being with a physical body. "I knew you before you were born", Jesus said. Each person is, therefore, complete and finished eternally, meaning certainly before sperm meets egg. We have always been persons, and we are still persons before we are born and afterward. We are born in the infinitely creative mind of God, who imagined the universe and then said "BE!" and it was.

We are created by God, and he made us like Him, according to Moses. In His image and likeness. That's why man has morality, a knowledge of right and wrong, and is the only creature on earth who has this. God said he made animals like animals and man like Himself. This, if you can make yourself believe there is a God, answers all the questions science cannot answer, about what and who we are, how we came to be this way.

And when God took the opportunity to answer mankind's deep questions about who He was and what He wanted from us, one of the first instructions given was that we shouldn't murder each other.

In this light, we who understand and accept the JudeoChristian version of events know from the beginning that abortion is murder, that it is wrong.

The other side, the activists, the liberals, have nothing but contempt for this set of beliefs. But they also have nothing to offer as counterbalance; they cannot explain what a human being is, when it becomes a human being, cannot answer the questions that ought to be settled before any more abortions are done.

Instead they talk of women's rights, forgetting even the words of the founding fathers concerning such things, that we are 'endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights, among them LIFE, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

If God did not grant us rights, we don't have them, according to the founding documents of this nation. Where do rights come from if not the Constitution? And the Constitution says they come from God.

So where does that leave the pro abortion side, many of whom reject God entirely and all of whom are disinterested in whether God sees abortion as the murder of a human being?

If there is a God (and there is), if there is a judgment for every human being (and there is), I pity the fool who selfishly supports abortion because it's a convenient way to avoid the consequences of bad decisions. Or because performing abortions makes him or her a good living. Or because people in need of abortions vote for the people who support them.

Over forty million abortions have been performed in this country since the early 1970's.

If you wonder why we are moving toward a welfare state imbalance, toward having too few workers and too many retired, think about forty million more people in this nation who would be working now, for the most part. More than forty million, since enough time has passed for them to have had children who would now be joining the workforce. It is the left and their determination to continue and increase abortions which has robbed this nation of millions upon millions of citizens in these current generations, a colossal loss of human capital whose contributions cannot be overestimated.

Or see it as God does, as a tragic display of casual selfish brutality, another in an endless line of proofs that man has a sinful nature and indulges it, and that Christ's sacrifice was necessary to absolve them of a universe of sins.

And if you can't get past this business of women's rights, think for a moment of all the women who chose abortion as 22 year olds or 18 year olds, or 14, and then had to spend the rest of their lives seeing children of various ages and crying silently to themselves, "my son or daughter would have been this age now". I have known more than one woman in this terrible position; there is massive guilt over the choice to end that life, longing for the child that should have lived, regret at a selfish and foolish decision made at a young and naive stage of life. They never recover fully; the guilt and shame and anguish are lasting. And these are only the women who admitted it to me. Imagine how many cases of depression and illness and suffering for middle aged and older women can be properly blamed on this incredible guilt and shame, unspoken, unadmitted.

Some women I've known still defend it even as they suffer. They are not willing to speak the truth plainly; "I killed my child". But they know. And some say it outright, through tears.

I cannot imagine their plight. But one thing is certain; the moral responsibility for what they've done is shared in great measure by the people who defended abortion, argued for it, convinced them to abort. Told them it was their right. Made it seem like a simple medical procedure, a wart removed, or a cyst. A tissue mass.

Saturday, April 12, 2008

Kerry Emmanuel is a scientist. He's not just any scientist; he's an MIT scientist. He does the math that shows the world is going to cook and we're all going to die from global warmening.

Kerry Emmanuel is one of the jokers who predicted in 2005 (after Katrina) that 2006 would be even more dreadful. Then, after 2006 was considerably less dreadful than 2005, Emmanuel predicted that 2007 would be the ultimate dreadful hurricane season.

Now that 2007 has shown itself to have been similarly undramatic, it's time for the expert to explain himself.

So Kerry Emmanuel has changed his tune, now saying that even though global warmening is actually happening and we're all going to die, nevertheless hurricanes aren't going to get stronger and more numerous for a while.

He has invented a 'novel' formula to predict this, and he espouses it with great confidence; it is the same great confidence with which he espoused the previous failed formulas.

Rather than reconsider the larger picture, he set about creating a formula that would still prove his previous preexisting conclusion while taking into account the data which argues for the opposite conclusion.

Only a scientist could manage this, but don't worry-- K.E. is one of the best. Heh heh.

Remember, the most recent actual global temperature measurements tell us we haven't seen actual warming since 2004, and that the recent ten year period is either flat or cooling in trend, with the warmest weather in 1998. This ten year non-warming trend has actually leveled the charts for the previous 100 years, putting us at current temperatures which do NOT support the whole global warmening thing.

Coincidentally, the sun has been dead quiet in terms of sunspots since 2005, and the latest cycle of sunspots is now two years late and counting. Sunspots are the cause of increased solar radiation striking earth, and when sunspots are at a minimum, the weather historically has been cold.

But rather than incorporate THIS data and reach different conclusions, these 'scientists' approach their work with conclusions already formed and then create the math to explain their preexisting conclusions.

Thursday, April 10, 2008

In addition to being stunned at the fact that Air America, the left wing radio network that can't make a buck the honest way, is still actually broadcasting, I am now stunned to find that this bunch actually has standards.

They've fired Randi Rhodes, the jockette with the checkered present. She not only has faked a mugging (told people she was mugged when the truth was something wierder, involving a fall, possibly a drunken stupor or worse), she has recently used filthy language to describe the Obama non-supporters among the Democrat party. Hillary is a 'f***ing whore', Geraldine Ferraro and Hillary are both 'f***ing bitc**s', you get the picture. Randi Rhodes in top form.

So what does Err Amerika do when it's missing a marquis name? They take a dip in the talent pool-- Hollywood actors. Richard Belzer will fill her timeslot on a temporary basis, probably trying to earn it permanently.

Yep, Richard Belzer from Law and Order. Used to be a comic, now a deadpan dramatic actor.

I wonder how Billary are taking this. The hardcore left were always in the bag for the Klintoons way back when. Now they seem to not only have lost their appetite for Klintommunism, they actually seem to hate the both of them. With a f**ing passion.

I woke up at 3:30 this morning to a sound I've heard about but never heard-- the sound of a train passing right by the front of my house.

Since there are no tracks, it occurred to me that I might be in the middle of some real trouble... I woke up, looked out the front window and saw my big oak tree doing impossible things, twisting, leaping, looking like it wanted to vacate the yard and come join me in the master bedroom.

To my great good fortune it did not. Others in my neighborhood did that, and on almost every block of my 1200 home subdivision there is at least one mature tree split down the middle or missing half its limbs or snapped off at its base. Many homes have lost shingles, and at least a dozen have had big strong fences come down.

My fence bent but did not break. My electric security gate, which is a part of the fence when it is closed, was not so fortunate.

It was pushed off its rail (not easy, as it has a very big metal clasp that was designed to hold the unattached end in place when closed) and twisted outward into the alley. More than half the fencing wood was torn off it and the rest is splintered and loose. The drive chain, of course, snapped.The gate was only partially blocking the alley, but pieces of wood bristling with nails were everywhere, and it took a while to collect them.

Then the more arduous task of heaving the gate back onto its rails began. It has an iron frame, the wood was soaked, and it weighed several hundred pounds.

I finally figured out that my floor jack has castered wheels and I was able to use it to lift and move the gate back where it belonged, after prying the splintered beam out of the guide area.

With thanks sent heavenward for our comparative blessings, and prayers for the less fortunate around here who had roofs off and cars crushed by carports and so on, I now set about finding a repair guy who can do this job before September.

Those guys are booked pretty solid after this little adventure.

After one year in Dallas, I've concluded the weather here is very much more adventurous than in Houston. The TV people continue to insist that this was 'straight line winds', but I've been in some very strong winds that did not make this particular sound. It is just as they say, a train coming past the house at good speed, a rumbling and roaring. I can't help but believe a little funneling was going on.

Wednesday, April 9, 2008

**Obama, like her husband a Harvard-trained lawyer, listened and then spoke off the cuff.

Most Americans, she said, don't want much.

"They don't want the whole pie," she told the women. "There are some who do, but most Americans feel blessed just being able to thrive a little bit. But that is becoming even more out of reach."

After law school, she and Barack were beset by loans they'd still be paying had her husband not written two best-sellers, "The Audacity of Hope" and "Dreams From My Father."

Those debts early in their marriage, she said, equips her husband to better understand the problems many Americans face.

Should she become first lady, she said she'd focus on family issues.

"If we don't wake up as a nation with a new kind of leadership...for how we want this country to work, then we won't get universal health care," she said.

"The truth is, in order to get things like universal health care and a revamped education system, then someone is going to have to give up a piece of their pie so that someone else can have more."**

There you go, America. Because she 'had it tough', which is to say she and her husband used student loans to become Harvard-trained lawyers, she's convinced that someone has to give up a piece of the pie so others can have more.

My first difficulty is probably yours too; how does a Harvard lawyer with a Harvard lawyer husband lay claim to anything like a tough life? I have several doctor friends who are still paying student loans well into their forties. It's how you pay for enormously expensive educations that reap enormously large results. If your results come slow and your loans are hard to pay, why is that someone else's problem? Why does someone else have to hand over a slice of the pie, probably a pie they earned by going to school and paying off some student loans THEMSELVES?

My second, and larger, difficulty is of course with socialism itself.

History shows that, when you use government to decide how much of a person's productivity they are allowed to keep for themselves and how much should be given to those who did not earn it, you put a MAJOR damper on future productivity. People rightly ask why they should work so hard if it's only to put money in the pocket of someone who DOESN'T.

Human beings are consistent in that they work hardest and achieve the most when they are in a position to benefit from their own work. When they find they're instead in charge of paying for everyone else's expenses, they tend to slack off, sometimes in a big way.

And this is the rub with socialism; lower productivity per person, especially when you factor in the very high achievers who now have these targets on their backs, results in less wealth, less to redistribute, LESS FOR EVERYONE.

Socialism does NOT alleviate poverty; it spreads poverty UP the income ladder by reducing incomes in the higher rungs.

Naturally, government will get around to solving the problem of decreased productivity by becoming the agency of decision for who will do what job, where, how much of the time-- in other words, de facto slavery will be the result. It was in the Soviet Union. And of course it would be the result under HillaryCare, in which we all know doctors would have to submit to the State as to what specialty they pursue and where in America they will locate.

Folks, when government is that much in charge of your life, you're either in the military or you're a slave. Military is voluntary service; the rest is mandatory. That's the difference.

Socialism does NOT work. It's been tried enough, in enough historical times and places, for the conclusion to be obvious to all but the most determinedly blind.

But it's always the SMART people, the morally superior people, the 'wisest ones' (as Sheryl Crow's new song would have it), who think that it will work this time because this time the SMART people will be in charge.

And socialism is just communism without the 'nationalizing' of industry. The corporations are still nominally owned by stockholders and run by boards, and it's only the cash flow that's 'nationalized'. In communism, they stop pretending and actually make the corporations state-owned enterprises to be run by Central Planning Kommittee. But the principle is the same; all wealth belongs to the state to distribute as it sees fit, and anyone with moreof anything than another person is morally culpable for that wrongful state of affairs.

Like mom used to say, 'eat your dinner, there are people starving in Ethiopia". I never managed to understand how eating my Brussels sprouts helped anyone in Ethiopia, but there you are.

Tuesday, April 8, 2008

I was hearing the Dancing with the Stars TV show in the other room a moment ago (the other room being the kitchen, where something wonderful was happening), and Sheryl Crow came on as the guest performer.

She began singing, and I began to suspect that the snippets of words I was hearing belonged to some new happy meaningless spiritualistic sort of liberal anthem. Something like "We are the World".

Me and my morbid curiousity. I didn't hear much of the song, but I had to go and Google the lyrics. Here's a sample--

"Losing babies to genocide,oh, where's the meaning in that plight.Can't you see we've really bought intoEvery word they proclaimed and every lie.."

Once again our cruel and ignorant society has left it to the pop singers to bring morality and goodness back to the public square.

Who is "they"? She doesn't say. And clearly she doesn't mean herself when she says "we've" bought into the lies "they" proclaimed. Smart people like Sheryl Crow knew 'they' were lying all along.

Interestingly, in the chorus she pleads with 'children of Abraham' to lay down their fears and swallow their tears, yada yada. Children of Abraham. Jews and Arabs. Carter couldn't do it. Clinton couldn't do it. Arafat and Rabin couldn't do it. But now Sheryl Crow has solved the middle east crisis. Lay down your fears, Palestinians (?). Swallow your tears, Israelis (like they haven't already been doing this for sixty years).

Later she intones, "every man is his own prophet, every prophet just a man"

It's an insult to Islam and Mohammed (bravo Cheryl, brave stuff) and to Christianity (same old junk, yada yada). The Jews, apparently, do not appear on her theological radar screen. Lucky them.

Christians, as usual, will yawn and ignore her.

Muslims will issue a fatwa and set about killing her for blaspheming the holiness of their proph-- wait. Sheryl Crow is a liberal, an activist, anti-Bush, anti-evangelical.

They can always kill her later.

Blasphemically speaking, though, 'every prophet just a man' is a traditional Christian blasphemy too, the kind that used to be illegal in England and the empire. She has gone to the trouble here to deny the supernatural aspect of Christ in specific terms.

Pretty bold for a pop singer.

"Let every man bow to the best in himself-We're not killing anymore.We're the wisest ones, everybody listen'cause you can't fight this feeling any more."

Gawd this is crap. Mindless leftist drivel, presumptive moral superiority on NO grounds whatsoever. It's secular humanist dreck, this constant hope and dream of human perfection and peace and love and world harmony. Sorry Sheryl-- not this planet, not this race, not this universe. Not gonna happen.

"We're the wisest ones"? Staggering arrogance disguised (thinly) as moral superiority. How does a pop singer and her 17 - 34 yr. old CD-buying demographic, mostly women, assume the mantle of wisdom? Socrates, Marcus Aurelius, Augustine, Aquinas, Hobbes, Hume, Edwards, Qutb and Zawahiri and bin Laden, all those who have been held by various parts of the world at various times to be wise, all now take a back seat to Sheryl Crow and her 'me' generation; they are 'the wisest ones'. I know of a few mullahs who might be rankled.

This song is another droplet in a Niagara Falls of evidence that liberals aren't serious, don't recognize evil or have any plan for dealing with it, can't come to terms with the fact that human beings are imperfect and some of us are downright evil and nasty.

Wait-- she knows we rightwing nutjobs are evil and nasty, but fortunately she hasn't elucidated any plan to rid the world of US-- at least not in this song.

They still think, just like in the '60's, that if they can just enlighten the dim, kill the killers with kindness and elevate the human race with that last lunge for the exact right kind of knowledge and wisdom, then THIS time, THIS century, THIS world can be overflowing with peace, love and harmony.

Children of Abraham, lay down your fears. Sheryl the psychoanalyst has concluded that fear, not anger, drives radical Islam, and that fear, not sensible self-defense, drives the IDF.

Dreck and drivel.

The lead line in the chorus says it best..

'if we could only get out of our heads and into our hearts'.

This world needs less thinking and more feeling. THAT will solve all the problems of humanity.